Category The Monthly Book

This month’s Monthly Book should keep you intrigued for the summer – it’s a novel of love and grief, a dystopian travelogue, a triumph of imaginative fiction with interests in story, language, the body, the environment and the power of belief. My interview with Michel Faber is here, and the transcript appears below. Michel […]

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is Richard Flanagan’s wonderful novel which has just won this year’s Man Booker Prize! You can watch my interview with Richard for The Monthly Book here or read the transcript below: Heroism, goodness, mateship, war, enmity, class, memory, self-delusion, passion, guilt, honour and loyalty – these are just some […]

This month’s Monthly Book is Erik Jensen’s Acute Misfortune: The life and death of Adam Cullen (Black Inc.). You’ll find an interview with him here, and the transcript below. This is Jensen’s first book, a finely written account of the self-destructive, charismatic Australian painter who won the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 2000 and died […]

The Monthly Book for September is master storyteller Helen Garner’s new non-fiction work: the devastating, utterly compelling This House of Grief (Text Publishing). Here’s my interview with Helen Garner conducted at the Opening night event of the Melbourne Writers Festival. (The transcript appears below.) Helen Garner begins This House of Grief in a time-honoured way, with […]

Here’s my interview with Anne Manne, author of The Life of I, this month’s Monthly Book. Book Notes: What made the young Norwegian Anders Breivik explode a bomb in central Oslo and then arm himself with weapons, travel to an island gathering of young members of the Norwegian Labour Party and open fire on them, […]

Here’s the latest Monthly Book interview (transcript below): Janette Turner Hospital talking about her new novel The Claimant. It’s a book about spies and collaborators, about art and religion, and its focus is a fictional court case in the late 20th century over a family fortune and the search for a lost heir. Its concern […]

Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 – Francine Prose This month’s Monthly Book is a novel set in the dark and somewhat seamy depths of Paris in the 1930s. My interview with Francine Prose can be found here. The transcript appears below. Francine Prose’s Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 was inspired by […]